Courageous Conversation Report

The meeting of the Central Florida Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (CFAMFT) was one of the warmest and welcoming meetings I have ever been to. The meeting opened with announcements then each person in attendance introduced themselves. This is a very supportive group of counselors. I was impressed that they also ran a 50/50 raffle to help raise funding for scholarships for students who wish to become marriage and family counselors. The core of the meeting revolved around Tara Harvill who talked about couples in conflict and trying to make a connection with them. Her presentation was titled Courageous Conversations and its intent was to demonstrate how to get couples to connect with each other in a healthy way. This state of connection could be defined as love which includes vulnerability, surrender, self-valuing, stability, and motivation to confront, instead of avoiding the most unpleasant parts of ourselves. To do this we want to work on a non-shaming way for a couple to deal with their issues. This can be accomplished by an experiential and process oriented technique; Intimacy from the inside out (IFIO) which includes the integration of intra and interpersonal work. The idea is to seek out the different perspectives in the couple in order to differentiate between each individual’s …show more content…
Each individual, when confronted with perceived danger (conflict), each must decide whether to run from or confront the other (fight /flight). Consequently, each individual throughout their respective lives had developed protectors (defense mechanisms) in order to deal with perceived danger. These protectors will battle, run away, acquiesce, project, avoid, blame, and/or shame in order to acquire a sense of safety. The therapist needs to track these protective sequences during session and confront them with compassion and